An Investigation On The Correlation Between English Pragmatic Competence And Cognitive Style

Over the years,foreign language teaching in China has made great progress.However,the majority of teachers feel that it is difficult for our students to communicate effectively and properly with foreign languages.Cognitive style is an essential component of individual differences among learners.Studying the relationship between pragmatic competence and cognitive style has both temporal urgency and practical significance.?In this study,120 college students were surveyed and then SPSS 26.0 was used for quantitative analysis of the data.This study adapts the test of previous researches’ pragmatic competence from the aspects of topic type and scenario design.Question types include multiple choice,true or false question,dialogue completions,reading comprehension and essay writing.Each question type includes request,apology and refusal speech act.The Cognitive Style Figure Test was used to test the cognitive style of college students,and the correlation analysis was made between the four dimensions of pragmatic expression competence(oral/written)and pragmatic comprehension competence(oral/written).This study mainly discusses the following research questions:(1)Is there a statistically significant difference in the correlation between cognitive style and pragmatic competence of college students?(2)Is there a statistically significant difference in pragmatic competence between dependent and independent cognitive styles?(3)Is there a statistically significant difference in pragmatic competence between English majors and non-English majors?The study found that(1)The correlation coefficient between field-dependent/field-independent cognitive style and total pragmatic competence,total pragmatic comprehension competence and oral pragmatic comprehension competence reached statistical significance.(2)The difference between field-dependent and field-independent cognitive style learners in total pragmatic competence,total pragmatic comprehension competence,oral pragmatic comprehension competence and written pragmatic comprehension competence is statistically significant.(3)There is a statistically significant difference between English majors and non-English majors in total pragmatic competence,total pragmatic competence,oral pragmatic competence and written pragmatic competence.Based on the above results,this study believes that the influence of individual differences on pragmatic learning should not be ignored in the process of English learning and teaching.In the teaching process,more corresponding and personalized classroom models should be introduced to give more students the opportunity to learn efficiently.Teachers should also promote the awareness of pragmatic teaching.